Puzzlings Review

Fun for younger players and younger-at-heart players, too.

Because the iPhone is perfectly suited for match-three puzzle games, there is a cornucopia of them on the App Store. A plethora, too. Crowds cause titles to be lost in the pack, so developers need a little flash and ingenuity to make their game stand out. Puzzlings from Bight Games zooms in on a clothing collection gimmick that's straight out of one of those freakishly addictive Facebook games and then throws a Technicolor can of paint over the whole thing. The result is a game that is perfectly suited to hand off to younger gamers that desperately want to try out that cool iPhone you carry around.

The game is front-loaded with a silly story about returning color to the land of Wardrobia. It's just a set-up for the collecting mechanic. While matching colorful blocks, you unlock clothes and body accents for your little Puzzling. There are hats, shirts, horns, smouths, eyes, peanut butter jars, and more to accumulate -- and a handy screen shows you which items in each world you've banked. Bight smartly doles out collectibles at a rapid pace, which makes you want to play just one... more... level... to see what you might get next. Plus, you can instantly put the item on your little Puzzling -- no need to wait until you can back out to the main menu. (Although that is where you indeed manage your closet as well as change the colors of items and your Puzzling.)

The puzzling follows the basic tenets of match-three. Line up three or more blocks of the same color and they vanish. New pieces cascade down to fill in the gaps, which often leads to combos. To move blocks, you just swipe through pair, trios, and quads to make a line of pieces to rotate. You do not have to make a match with every move, though; the pieces will not revert back to their original place. This lets you create your own matches at your own pace, although the faster you move, the better. Later in the game, you encounter larger blocks like giant squares and rectangles that make it harder to manipulate the field, but do lead to bigger bonuses.

Ar, matey! Thanks for collectin' me hat.

In addition to the main puzzle mode, you can also try a challenge mode which tasks you with clearing the screen within a set number of moves. This mode is definitely harder, so the game does have something for older players that might otherwise find the main game too easy thanks to the ability to swap and rotate pieces whenever and wherever.

But let me be straight here: even with the challenge mode, this is an easy game. This game will not slow down advanced gamers. You could breeze through it in just a few hours, tops. It's not that there aren't enough stages (there are eight worlds, with a handful of stages in each world), but just that it is easy to make enough matches to beat the stage. I'm not necessarily disappointed by this, though, because I recognize that this is aimed squarely at gamers that don't block out every Thursday night to hammer on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It's more for the crowd that plays Pokemon or cannot get enough of Sorority Life on Facebook. And that's okay.

The day-glo look of the game is very appealing. I dig the pop art style and like the silliness of some of the items you collect, such as the peanut butter jar that your puzzling's hand gets stuck in and is forced to walk with. Bight included a mode for snapping photos of your dressed-up puzzling, which you can easily share with friends. The music is also quite good; light and boppy, it fits the on-screen action.

Puzzlings was reviewed with version 1.0.

The Verdict

There are eight worlds to explore and dozens upon dozens of items to collect, so Puzzlings has plenty to offer for its download price. The collecting side quest is a great hook that will keep folks playing, just to see what item they get next. Coupling this Pokemon-style collecting with some great pop art graphics makes Puzzlings a great game for younger players -- and older gamers that are young at heart.